August 8, 2013
10:00 AM (EDT)

News Release Number: STScI-2013-27

Hubble Finds Source of Magellanic Stream

August 8, 2013: Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have solved a 40-year mystery on the origin of the Magellanic Stream, a long ribbon of gas stretching nearly halfway around our Milky Way galaxy.

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the
Milky Way, are at the head of the gaseous stream. Since the stream's
discovery by radio telescopes in the early 1970s, astronomers have
wondered whether the gas comes from one or both of the satellite
galaxies. Now, new Hubble observations reveal that most of the gas was
stripped from the Small Magellanic Cloud about 2 billion years ago, and a
second region of the stream originated more recently from the Large
Magellanic Cloud.